Ralph Waldo Emerson was a nineteenth century American literary philosopher and the chief figure of the New England Renaissance. His work reflects earlier Anglo-American and European traditions of thought and was a significant influence on subsequent developments in American philosophy and American culture generally--where he and his writings are deeply rooted.

Scholarship on Emerson to date has not considered Spinoza’s influence upon his thought. Indeed, from his lifetime until the twentieth century, Emerson’s friends and disciples engaged in a concerted cover-up because of Spinoza’s hated name. However, Emerson mentioned his respect and admiration of Spinoza in his journals, letters, lectures, and essays, and Emerson’s thought clearly shows an importation of ideas central to Spinoza’s system of metaphysics, ethics, and biblical hermeneutics. In this essay, I undertake a biographical and philosophical study in (...) order to show the extent of Spinoza’s influence on Emerson and how this changes the traditional understanding of Emerson’s thought. (shrink)

All students of Nietzsche know of his profound admiration for Emerson’s writing. However, as Stanley Cavell has observed, this knowledge has mostly been repressed or ineffective; which is to say that the extent, depth, and specificity of Emerson’s influence upon Nietzsche has remained largely unacknowledged and unassessed. In the course of the past decade or so, owing in large part to the influence of Cavell’s own work on Emerson (and Nietzsche), this situation has begun to change. Emerson’s work has increasingly (...) been taken up philosophically, and students of both Emerson and of Nietzsche have begun to explore systematically the relations between them. While the present study devotes considerably more attention to Nietzsche than to Emerson, it constitutes a provocative and important contribution to this work and enriches our understanding of each of these thinkers. (shrink)

Including the substantial Introduction by Richard Eldridge, this volume consists of nine previously unpublished essays each of which focuses upon a single region of Cavell’s work. While the scope of the issues considered in the volume can be only incompletely indicated by listing the regions addressed, they include: ethics, philosophy of action, the normativity of language, aesthetics and modernism, American philosophy, Shakespeare, film, television, and opera, and the relation of Cavell’s work to German philosophy and Romanticism. The volume also contains (...) a useful index, and a brief annotated bibliography of works by and about Cavell. (shrink)

This dissertation challenges the widely accepted view that Emerson's thought shifted from a naive affirmation of individual power, in his early works, to a more sober focus, in his later ones, on the forces that limit the autonomy and power of individual acts. In contrast, this study maintains that Emerson's writings, early and late, consistently portray human acts as limited by both the cultural media with which they must be articulated and the material environment they strive to re-shape. Early works (...) such as Nature, "Self-Reliance," and "Compensation" analyze creative change as a process of limited transcendence, in which people turn inherited cultural tools to new uses, exceeding the previous reality only by facilitating the emergence of another, also limited, reality. Emerson thus prefigures the pragmatism of William James, which views ideas as limited tools whose "truth" lies in their ability to facilitate human acts. This approach complicates the familiar charges that Emerson supports a capitalist ideology of individualism or discourages political reform. Indeed, a central concern of this study is to re-assess Emerson's individualist ethics. His views on issues such as political reform, division of labor, and property reflect a pragmatic emphasis on action, and thus differ from both capitalism and Marxism, which emphasize the material products of labor. Similarly, Emerson's use of the essay series portrays writing as an exploratory act, stressing the public status of language and de-emphasizing the degree to which writing expresses individual intention or "property." The dissertation reads Representative Men as an individualist theory of the self's relation to culture and "great men," written partly as a response to Thomas Carlyle's On Heroes and Hero-Worship. Finally, this study explores how "Experience" and "Fate," often read as evidence of a growing skepticism and fatalism in Emerson's works, in fact portray limitation and loss as the necessary conditions for the creative change and freedom that make life meaningful, thereby anticipating William James' pluralist and meliorist defense of belief. (shrink)

When I cruise the forty-three television channels available to me (and that's basic cable), simultaneously being enchanted and disgusted by much that I see (a kind of Kantian sublime), I cannot help but think that the culture in which I find myself is less articulate than ever. For this situation perhaps the 43rd President of the United States could serve as a useful emblem—a joke that is all too easy to make. But such a diagnosis of the low standard of (...) my culture's literacy might also be too easy to make. For it is the case that America's traditional anti-intellectualism reaches new heights in our current, hypermediated milieu: we now have more venues than ever to disseminate undisciplined, uncreative thought (think, for example, of all the burgeoning blogs). On the other hand, such hypermediation amounts to an explosion of symbolization. Language is everywhere, and hence there is the demand to use it instrumentally well. Again, an image from the U.S. presidency is emblematic. Think of President Clinton's infamous line to the intrepid Independent Counsel: "It depends on what your definition of the word 'is' is." Such a line could represent the pervasive urge to absolutely precise articulation, controlling one's words to an extreme degree. Another emblem could be the common academic paper where a writer has masterfully summarized and explained the words of another thinker, rendering them more accessible but probably not more desirable. One could read this situation dialectically: the moment when concern for the value of language seems lowest is also the moment when the demand for controlling language is highest. Beyond dialectics, however, I take the demand for absolute articulation as a jumping-off point for considering an idea that might appear to have nothing to do with this implicit yet persistent demand—the concept of presence. More specifically, I want to consider how a particular rendering of this concept affects what we might call the divine and its relationship to an ostensibly secular culture, and I also want to consider some lines from Emerson and how they can lead one to think of the divine as presence, a presence that requires an absence, a presence that to some extent is an absence. According to this encounter with Emerson, thinking about the presence and absence of the divine has to do with the way one takes up writing. (shrink)

This paper concerns the character of Emerson's philosophy, and his general attitude toward life, in relationship to the human tendency to become isolated or compartmentalized, in view and attitude, by the specifics of work, career and particular perspectives.

Here H.G. Callaway offers us a new reading edition of the oft-cited, commonly-studies, and widely-enjoyed Emerson text The Conduct of Life. This edition provides an introduction by Callaway, annotations throughout, a chronology, a bibliography, and index, and modern spellings throughout. And it does its job well.

Emerson's poetry since his publication of Poems in 1847 has been misevaluated, underrated, and to a large extent overlooked by critics. My dissertation endeavors to view Emerson's poems in the mode of his visionary poetics, so that Emerson's aesthetics and verse may be more thoroughly appreciated, and more effectively appraised. The dissertation addresses this argument by foregrounding Emerson's aesthetics in his changing view of theology in the early 1830's, and tracing his new First Philosophy to its epistemological extensions in his (...) poetics and verse. ;The first chapter provides an overview of criticism concerning Emerson's poetry to the modern period. The second chapter discusses the growth of Emerson's First Philosophy and visionary poetics. Chapter three analyzes Emerson's representative early poems that attempt visionary capacity. The fourth chapter, in four poems from the middle period, considers Emerson's aesthetic of the kairos, or breakthrough of the veil of the phenomenal/nominal, showing the limitations of Emerson's aesthetic to reach through to an epiphany. Chapter five examines Emerson's most ambitious poem, "The Sphinx," finding it also unable to engage the kairos, despite its innovative apocalyptic poetics. The final chapter follows the descent of Emerson's optative mood concerning visionary poetics; the chapter then concludes by tracing this aesthetic in poets who followed Emerson to the present. ;The dissertation argues for a re-evaluation of Emerson as a poet original and innovative in philosophy and form, and for a rethinking of his poetry as aesthetically avantgarde and fundamentally influential to poets following him. (shrink)

Ralph Waldo Emerson famously warned his readers against the dangers of conformity and consistency. In this paper, I argue that this warning informs his engagement with and opposition to a Kantian view of rational agency. The interpretation I provide of some of Emerson's central essays outlines a unique conception of agency, a conception which gives substance to Emerson's exhortations of self-trust. While Kantian in spirit, Emerson's view challenges the requirement that autonomy requires acting from a conception of the law. The (...) key to understanding Emerson's opposition to Kant rests in showing how obeying the law requires spontaneity on the part of the agent herself. Emerson's concerns about conformity and consistency further enrich the view of agency, argued for by Richard Moran, according to which we take responsibility for our minds by taking up a first-person deliberative perspective on our minds. Conformity and consistency in one's thinking and acting permits society and one's own past to dictate when deliberation may come to an end, thereby undermining a crucial sense in which an agent, in taking up the deliberative perspective, has taken responsibility for her mind. (shrink)

Much of the attention of recent students of American philosophy has been concentrated on the study of philosophers and ways of doing philosophy in the post-Civil War era. It is understandable that this should be so, for the problems of late nineteenth and twentieth century thought are still alive, still perplexing, in our own attempts at philosophic understanding. There is much, however, that is overlooked by narrowing our focus to what Max Fisch and his associates describe as "classic" American philosophy, (...) and to our own post-classic era. It may well be that some aspects of the earlier and now unfashionable philosophies and philosophers can still have resonance in our thinking if only we are willing to give these older philosophies a hearing. For this reason, this present study explores the philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson and reexamines his thought at the point where, it seems to me, it is still viable today, namely as a social philosophy for a society, like our own, hopelessly committed to an extreme individualism. (shrink)

As a prodigious American intellectual, rhetorician, and poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson pursued many ideas. This dissertation examined one particularly significant theme in his writings: what I called "endings." A series of tragic and untimely deaths of loved ones caused him to take an extensive interest in the idea of endings. As for the literature that surrounds Emerson, some scholars have directly discussed his reaction to loss, while others have indirectly discussed a corollary theme, incompleteness. These studies overlook the extensive connection (...) between his experience with loss and his consideration of endings and, equally as important, how his consideration of endings mutated and transformed during his intellectual career. The central lesson that we can draw from this study is that these traumatic experiences with loss made Emerson averse to endings, an aversion so significant that it not only intersects his intellectual career but also constitutes a major theme that threads his corpus. After closer examination of Emerson's contemplation with endings, we can conclude that death underlies his embrace of life. A more insightful and appreciative way to see this is that this dissertation reveals two closely related dialectics at the center of Emerson's life as a thinker: death and life and, closely related, endings and beginnings. His life was spent in dialogue with these two dialectical oppositions. (shrink)

In his lifetime, Ralph Waldo Emerson became the most widely known man of letters in America, establishing himself as a prolific poet, essayist, popular lecturer, and an advocate of social reforms who was nevertheless suspicious of reform and reformers. Emerson achieved some reputation with his verse, corresponded with many of the leading intellectual and artistic figures of his day, and during an off and on again career as a Unitarian minister, delivered and later published a number of controversial sermons. Emerson’s (...) enduring reputation, however, is as a philosopher, an aphoristic writer (like Friedrich Nietzsche) and a quintessentially American thinker whose championing of the American Transcendental movement and influence on Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, William James, and others would alone secure him a prominent place in American cultural history. (shrink)

American transcendentalism is essentially a kind of practice by which the world of facts and the categories of common sense are temporarily exchanged for the world of ideas and the categories of imagination. The point of this exchange is to make life better by lifting us above the conflicts and struggles that weigh on our souls. As these chains fall away, our souls rise to heightened experiences of freedom and union with the good. Emerson and Thoreau are the two most (...) significant nineteenth century proponents of American transcendentalism. (shrink)

As this writer reads him, Emerson's thinking falls into three loose and broad categories. He held soul to be divine, that intuition or divine spark within every man, whereby every man is capable of infinite growth. He regarded Nature as the lengthened shadow of God cast upon human sense, a kind of incarnation of some Divine Power here on earth. And he believed Deity ever near to man, and every soul possessed of access to Deity, not continuously, but at least (...) in moments of exaltation. This triple structure--the primacy of the soul, the immediacy of Nature, and Divine Immanence--might be called the skeleton framework of his message. (shrink)

Buell has written an excellent intellectual biography of Emerson--which is especially good on Emerson's relationship to Thoreau. This is a book in the style of American literary studies and certainly of use to students of Emerson's thought in philosophy. "On the occasion of Emerson’s 200th birthday, Lawrence Buell revisits the life of the nation’s first public intellectual and discovers how he became a "representative man.".

All of Kant's thinking is directly or indirectly preoccupied with the question "What is Man?" Nowhere is this question posed with more thoroughness than in his lesser-known historical writings, of which the "Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View" and "Conjectural Beginning of Human History" are canonical statements. It is here that he enunciates a world-historical ideology of human progress. History is viewed as the universal march of reason, which is to say, the cosmopolitan advance of (...) the political ideals of European civilization . ;But Kant's Old World Enlightenment model also harbors a natural and organic rhetoric that leads directly to the New world doorstep of Emerson, whose own more manifestly biological speculations play out the darker consequences of Kant's thought. Emerson's essays and Journals are rife with passages where he argues that the evolutionary process of natural history functions also at the level of human civilizations. Looking world-historically, he argues that peoples and nations compete for biological survival and self-advancement, and the fate of such "races" as the "Negro" and "Indian" now hangs in the balance. Shocking and scandalous as Emerson's racial doctrines are, they present themselves as a kind of humanism and a natural law of culture, and bear direct comparison to Kant's more morally recuperative enunciations of world-historical necessity. ;Nietzsche, as the aversive heir of Kant, and Emerson's part-time contemporary, attacks the former's rational certitudes and more polemically extends the latter's cultural, biological, and super-humanist tropes. Both Emerson and Nietzsche pare Kant's doctrine of the faculties down to its categorical minima and radicalize the constituent elements of his historical faith: the moral will, the idea of progress, the ends of man. All three figures, however, theorize "man" as both a moral and extra-moral agent driven and constrained by his biological condition; and as a species whose historical prospect is foreshortened by the ideological foresight of its outstanding specimens. (shrink)

In Memories and Portraits: Explorations in American Thought, H. G. Callaway embeds his distinctive contextualism and philosophical pluralism within strands of history and autobiography, spanning three continents. Starting in Philadelphia, and reflecting on the meaning of home in American thought, he offers a philosophically inspired narrative of travel and explorations, in Europe and Africa, illuminating central elements of American thought—partly out of diverse foreign and domestic reactions and fascinating cultural contrasts. -/- This book is of interest for the contemporary interplay (...) of analytic philosophy with American pragmatism and for those focused on the interaction of European and Anglo-American thought and society. In this book, the formalism of analytic philosophy encounters a logically articulate version of the contextualism implicit in the pragmatist tradition; and a deep and abiding interest in natural science is augmented by a more literary account of the social and cultural contexts of inquiry—encountered in many years of travel and life abroad. The final chapter, employing a methodological naturalism, brings the perspectives and lessons, from near and far, back home for renewed reflection. (shrink)

This is my review of D.W. Howe's 2007 book, What Hath God Wrought, Transformation of America 1815-1848. The book is a volume in the new Oxford History of the U.S.(O.U.P. 2007)--exploring the transformation of the early American republic through the period of domination of the Jacksonian Democrats. This is also the period of the New England Renaissance and the early work of R.W. Emerson. Howe devotes a good deal of attention to Emerson and his influence and thereby provides needed historical (...) context for the understanding of American thought. (shrink)

This new edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Society and Solitude reproduces the original 1870 edition—only updating nineteenth-century prose spellings. Emerson’s text is fully annotated to identify the authors and issues of concern in the twelve essays, and definitions are provided for selected words in Emerson’s impressive vocabulary. The work aims to facilitate a better understanding of Emerson’s late philosophy in relation to his sources, his development and his subsequent influence.

This paper examines Santayana on imagination, and related themes, chiefly as these are expressed in his early work, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1900). My hypothesis is that Santayana under-estimates, in this book, the force and significance of the prevalent distinction between imagination and fancy, as this was originally put forward by Coleridge and later developed in Emerson’s late essays. I will focus on some of those aspects of Santayana’s book which appear to react to or to engage with Emerson’s (...) views and aim to bring Santayana’s treatment of the theme of imagination into relation with Emerson. Understanding the differences in greater detail we stand a better chance of reasoned evaluation of alternative conceptions of imagination. I will argue that the Coleridge-Emersonian conception of the distinction between imagination and fancy is a crucial element of the background of Peircean abduction, and in this fashion, contributes to the continuity of Emerson’s writings with the pragmatist tradition. (shrink)

The opening essay of Emerson’s 1860 book, The Conduct of Life, posed, in that fateful year of threatening Civil War and disunion, the philosophical problem of human freedom and fate. The essay “Fate” is followed in the present book by a series of essays on related themes, including: “Power,” “Wealth,” “Culture,” “Worship,” “Beauty” and “Illusions.” The central question of the volume is, “How shall I live?” Appreciating both our freedom and its limits, we understand the vitality of power to acquire (...) what wealth is needed to scale the corrections and heights of culture and worship, find beauty in life and human society, wary still of the illusions. Overall, the book is a call for creative solutions. Yet the nation, in the year of Abraham Lincoln’s election, seemed fated to war or disunion in spite of all its dedication to freedom. (shrink)

This new edition emphasizes Emerson's philosophy and thoughts on such issues as freedom and fate; creativity and established culture; faith, experience, and evidence; the individual, God, and the world; unity and dualism; moral law, grace, and compensation; and wealth and success. Emerson's text has been fully annotated to explain difficult words and to clarify his references. The Introduction, Notes, Bibliography, Index, and Chronology of Emerson's life help the reader understand his distinctive outlook, his contributions to philosophy, and his place in (...) American culture and society. (shrink)

The 14 essays assembled in this volume, along with their intensive scholarship, create somewhat the impression of a Who's Who of contemporary literary studies of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the American Transcendentalists. All has been brought together by Mott and Burkholder to honor Joel Myerson, with the words of Emerson's famous remark to Walt Whitman, "We greet You at the Mid-point of a Great Career" (p. xi). An authority on Transcendentalism, textual and bibliographical studies, Myerson has written, edited, or co-edited (...) nearly sixty books, including most recently, Emerson's Antislavery Writings (with Len Gougeon, 1995), The Selected Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1997), and the Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson (with Ronald A. Bosco). The career, like the present book, provides a marvelous contemporary focus on the 19th century American literary renaissance. Anyone writing on Emerson's thought will best view this volume as essential reading. (shrink)